Seven Year Twitch is impeded by some creaky plotting, finds Jane Shilling.

When it comes to marital misdemeanours, you’d think that a passion for birdwatching would be minor-league stuff. These days we all take a keen interest in the plight of the songthrush and the dunnock; and some of us have even been known to rise at 5.58am in order to catchRadio 4’s Tweet of the Day.

Still, an obsession with ornithology is the fatal flaw in the marriage of Terry and Fran, the hapless protagonists of David Lewis’s newcomedy of modern manners. Fran (Amanda Royle) pours out the latest melancholy instalment in her domestic drama to her therapist, Charlie (Paul Kemp). She had arranged a dinner party with her boss, Ben (Paul O’Mahony), and another couple, for which Terry (Simon Mattacks) was five hours late, having sped off to the other side of the country in pursuit of a yellow-bellied flycatcher. The other couple, stricken with norovirus, also failed to show, leaving Fran stranded with Ben, a man prone to long conversational pauses and anxiety about sex.

Unaccountably failing to ask the obvious question – why had Fran planned a dinner party with only five guests, including that priceless commodity, a reasonably presentable spare man? – Charlie refers Terry to his therapist colleague, Megan (Lucy Tregear), who also happens to be Ben’s therapist (do try and keep up).

As the drama unfolds in a series of ingeniously choreographed brief scenes, for which Sam Dowson’s design of a quartet of chairs (each with the therapist’s obligatory box of tissues within handy reach), provides an elegantly simple setting, it emerges that everyone – therapists as well as clients – is trapped in the intolerable (and increasingly preposterous) present by the emotional entanglements of the past.

David Lewis directs his own play, and provides an entertaining programme essay in which he describes the struggles of his divided self when it came to altering the script during rehearsals. These struggles remain to some extent unresolved in performance. The lineaments of a sharply observed and very funny play about emotional relationships in mid-life are clearly visible, but occasionally shrouded in a veil of superfluous verbiage and impeded by some creaky plotting.